One of Traverse City’s largest employers will expand its operation into Denver. The president of Hagerty Insurance says the expansion will give the company a back-up call center.
Hagerty made plans for an additional location last year, after routine maintenance shut down its operation for a couple hours. Company president, McKeel Hagerty, says the incident showed that the business was vulnerable to factors outside of their control.
Hagerty says the new call center in Denver will back up the main center and the time change will make it easier to keep customer service available for the West Coast.
He says the impact on Traverse City will be minimal.
“Only four people have relocated from Traverse City to Denver,” he says. “This was never intended to be a place where we took people from here and moved them out there.”
Hagerty Insurance has created 400 new jobs in the last decade selling insurance for vintage cars and boats. Most of those jobs are in downtown Traverse City where the company has added roughly 100,000 square feet of office space during that time, nearly tripling its size.
Altogether there are now 670 Hagerty employees. Because of the growth, Traverse City built a parking deck next to Hagerty’s headquarters.
McKeel Hagerty expects to keep up the pace of growth.
“The number of major things that we have in the pipeline will definitely require a lot more employees,” he says.
But he adds that he hopes they can do it without any more buildings in the near future.
